


Mourning's Light

by thecoldlightofday



Category: Walking Dead (TV)
Genre: F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-04
Updated: 2013-03-04
Packaged: 2017-12-04 06:44:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,165
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/707739
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thecoldlightofday/pseuds/thecoldlightofday
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>AU. Request "Shane mourns Lori. He’s alive somehow and he knows Lori died giving birth to his baby and knows Carl had to shoot her and Lori and Carl were everything to him."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Mourning's Light

The prison rang of phantom echoes, each of the noises swelling into a cacophony of grief. Shane put his face in his hands, palms cold and clammy, and felt the heat of his own anguish in his cheeks. He’d thought, the instant he realized what had happened, that he’d have broken down more completely. The sense of loss, there was nothing to describe it, the awful way it dug inside him—a knife, a flame, a bullet, a hurt that spread too deep. He’d seen his own pain externalized in the moment Rick fell to his knees. And Shane had wanted to fall with him, fall greater than him, but instead he’d just stood there, everyone’s eyes flickering from Rick to him, searching for a cue to follow.

The last time Shane had cried was a humid day in summer, his ear resting flatly across Rick’s heart.

He’d never been the type to show that kind of vulnerability. Not like Rick who had always been the first of the two of them to tears. He could remember being eight and Rick’s parents thinking it was a good idea to let the two of them watch _Old Yeller_. Rick had started bawling on the spot, all wretched weeping, while Shane had excused himself to the bathroom to cry with the door shut, crouched on the no slip rug next to the bathtub, noises he was making muffled in his sleeve.

He’d cry later, maybe, once the group stopped looking to him to lead.

There were footsteps in the hallway. Shane’s hands reached on instinct for his gun. The sentiment wasn’t there but the drive was—survival, always, food and water and flight and fuel—even if the world seemed kinder to the dead.

It was only Carl though, appearing in his cell’s doorway. Carl standing straight but still looking smaller than Shane had ever seen him, looking like his mother for an instant, in the bright way that his eyes bore a hole into Shane’s chest. Carl hadn’t so much as spoken, not since they returned and found him with Maggie, bloodied, mewling baby clasped against her breast. Carl was still quiet, pale from the severity of everything that had happened in the day. 

“Hey,” Shane said, so wrecked he sounded like a shadow. “It’s okay.” He patted the space beside him, mattress shedding plumes of dust into the air.

Carl was everything he had left to cling to, Carl and an un-named child. Carl who was, for the first time, more his boy than Rick’s. Carl was here now, coming to Shane over his father, leaning into him, asking Shane to take his weight, take everything from him, and Shane would. He’d take the world for Carl if he could. He knew that was what Lori wanted and he wished he could have given that to her, taken the horror of Lori’s death off of Carl, given just a little solace to the only woman he’d ever loved more than himself. “You don’t have to keep it in.” He felt the breath flow out of Carl at that, Carl’s tears burning as they soaked into the fabric of his shirt.

Carl shook, one of Shane’s arms around his shoulders, until he fell asleep. Shane sat there with Carl a few moments longer, but the sounds of the baby started to filter through to him, and he left Carl there eventually, tucked beneath Shane’s blanket and Shane’s sheet.

The group was waiting for him. They were clustered closely in the hallway, only a few feet from Rick’s cell door. They turned to him in unison and he flinched before he hardened, claustrophobic beneath the stares.

“What?” He asked. Talking wasn’t any easier, his throat too tight, every part of him raw like bloodied meat. He felt gutted, as if he’d been cut open from the center too.

“You should talk to him,” was all that Hershel said. Daryl nodded behind him in agreement and Daryl’s place in this, his goddamns say in the matter, made Shane want to laugh.

In the months since their fight over Randall, Shane had done everything he could to show Rick he’d learned his place. Come back even though it felt like he was dying, stifling the screaming part of himself each and every time he watched Rick make a mistake. He’d relented but it was like it didn’t matter. He was still on the periphery, the fringe group in everything, the only one who never got a say.

“Maybe you should send in Daryl. Rick seems to have more use for him than me.”

“Shane,” Maggie whispered and yeah, he knew what the group of them meant.

It wasn’t the same, Rick and Daryl. What he and Rick had was blood but stronger. There were years and years between them, sleepovers and fist fights and playing cards the night before Rick’s wedding, endless hands of rummy because Rick was too nervous to sleep. Shane was the only one who knew Rick, all of him, every one of the Rick’s that Rick had ever been.

There had been a moment, back in winter, when he’d gone out on a scouting mission with Rick. They’d talked, more than the few words they’d gotten into the habit of exchanging, and somehow the two of them had gotten to laughing when Shane had tripped over a fallen tree branch, and he’d thought maybe things would return to normal. Of course they hadn’t, but staring at the imprint his body had made in the snow when he’d landed, like an angel flopped face first from heaven, it had seemed like they’d been brothers again.

Shane swallowed thickly, nodding at the lot of them, and made his way into Rick’s cell.

Rick was facing the wall, tucked into himself, knees drawn up nearly to his chest. He was motionless, faded, gory shirt stretched tight across his back. The baby, _his_ baby—his only family in the world, wholly his, his blood that Lori had shed hers for—whimpered where she was swaddled in a towel on the end of Rick’s bed.

Shane gathered the bundle up carefully. The baby was tiny in his hands, wriggling as he cradled it to him, head pressed gently to his chest. He hadn’t held a baby since Carl, wasn’t used to it any longer, not the way he could support her body entirely in both hands. It was love at first sight, staring down at her, watching the scrunched face wrinkle and unwrinkled, holding a piece of Lori that she’d given him, part of Shane she’d made inside herself. Shane was angry again, suddenly, at Rick and Maggie and Hershel for failing them so terribly, but himself more than anything, because he’d done like Rick had asked him, backed off those months before on that highway even when he knew with Rick leading them they didn’t stand a chance.

He was right.

Rick hadn’t been able to keep them safe.


End file.
